Driving down the road, I passed a sign that asked simply, ” Who was the first person with a tablet to download data from the cloud?” The sign was in front of a church and the answer was, of course, Moses.
Fast forwarding about 3500 years, its no real surprise that Google gathers a lot of data… A LOT. Google has been gathering data about how quickly user behavior is shifting on mobile. Not only are more users on mobile devices when using Google search, but how they browse mobile results is changing too.
Likely as a result of what they saw in 2015, Google modified its ruleset to include mobile-friendly sites. If you were not at least mobile friendly, your site might NOT appear in mobile searches. This made sense, if you’re searching on a mobile device, you want to go to a mobile-friendly site.
According to StatCounter when looking at internet usage worldwide, as of October 2016, mobile traffic eclipsed desktop traffic 51% to 48%.
In 2018, Google again revamped its ruleset to require sites to be MOBILE FIRST and SECURE (HTTPS) as well as FASTER and RICHER in content. Google will be combining desktop and mobile search into a single unified search AND they will begin searching and indexing your content by looking at the mobile version of your site FIRST.
If you don’t have a mobile version of your site OR if the mobile version is a dumbed-down version of the desktop site, you could fall from Google’s grace in ranking, disappear from search and subsequently lose traffic.
If your was built before 2009, its very likely to NOT be mobile friendly. Now take a look at your own site on a tablet and then a smartphone. How does it look? Tiny, hard to read and navigate? Its time to give us a call.
